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March 24, 2015

Sheila turns 100

Sheila Hancock had her 100th appearance on Just A Minute today. She first appeared on the show in its 2nd ever show way way back in 1967, and 48 years later, she's still there, challenging, talking and being cheeky at the age of 82.

She is by a distance the most frequent woman panellist and is the only one who is still appearing who has stood up to both Kenneth Williams and Paul Merton and out-talked them both.

I'm a big fan and I thought it very appropriate that she won on her 100th appearance.

At 81, Sheila Hancock likes to joke that she
only has another 10 years to live. But far from resting on her laurels,
the award-winning actress, best-selling writer and grandmother of seven
has been busy launching a new career – as a novelist.

We meet soon after the publication of her debut novel, Miss Carter's War which has been well received.
She was already an accomplished author of autobiography, having won
plaudits in 2005 for The Two of Us, about her life with her second
husband, the late actor John Thaw, and in 2009 for Just Me, in which she
chronicled life getting used to being without him. But when her
publisher Bloomsbury approached her to write fiction, she didn’t think
she could do it.

Then her
imagination became engaged, after watching a woman being ignored by
everyone around her at Fortnum & Mason, simply because she was old.
Suddenly, Hancock found she wanted to write about somebody elderly and
lonely, who might have had an interesting life. Her attempt at the first
chapter was a disaster – “it was so boring, it was unbelievable” – and
the tale only started to come alive when she began to weave in strands
of her own life and interests.

The
plot thickened to include themes of education, the French Resistance,
and the shift in attitudes towards homosexuality. She researched hard
and was given an editor as a sounding board. “There were endless
rewrites, because I was coming at it new,” she says, and she almost gave
up after presenting a documentary about the Brontë sisters.

“Bloomsbury had given me an advance, so I phoned them up and said, 'I’m
writing a cheque, I’m sending the advance back. I can’t do this – I
just can’t. Because I’ve read these great books by the Brontës and I can
only be mediocre. I don’t like being mediocre.’ It took me about three
months to get over that.”

The role of teaching is at the heart of the book –
something that Hancock feels passionately about. She is involved with a
charity that tries to rescue primary school children who might
otherwise fail early in the system: “If you don’t pick ’em up at that
age, they will be behind for the rest of their lives.” In the
days before the Education Act of 1944 made grammar schools free, Hancock
won a scholarship to Dartford Grammar (“Dare I say I was a bright
kid?”). Her teachers were desperate for her to try for a “state
scholarship”, which would have subsidised her university years, but she
knew of no one who had gone. “I didn’t know what university was.” Her
head teacher tried to persuade her father, but the idea was lost on him,
too. Instead, she chose acting, and won a scholarship to Rada.
She had been hailed for her performance in the school play and the head
boy asked her to the dance. “I did think, 'This is good, this is
glamorous, it’s better than being a nurse.’ ” While other Rada
graduates went off to the Royal Shakespeare Company, Hancock spent eight
years in rep in Oldham. She performed a “huge” range of parts, but no
one picked her up until Joan Littlewood, the innovative director of
Theatre Workshop in east London, gave her an audition and transformed
the course of her acting life. “She said, 'You’re wonderful, my
little bird’, and she allowed us all to be ourselves.” In Littlewood’s
world, actresses didn’t have to be beautiful and middle class. “I would
have spent my life being a character actress if it hadn’t been for Joan,
because people like me played comic maids.” Hancock describes
her career trajectory as “muddled”. “I never get listed in the pantheon
of important actresses because I’ve so confused everybody. I played the
lead in Sweeney Todd at Drury Lane, I was the first Miss Halligan in
Annie [in 1978], I did revue with Kenneth Williams [One Over the Eight
in 1961], I’ve done lots of musicals – and I’ve been at the National
Theatre in The Cherry Orchard.” Despite her fame, Hancock has
been driven by a very basic urge. “I think of myself as a jobbing
actress. I’ve had to work to earn the money.” Even when she was married
to Thaw? “He felt the same. If you’ve been poor, it haunts you for the
rest of your life. And John was very poor.” Hancock’s marriage
to Thaw lasted from 1973 until 2002, when he died, at just 60, of
oesophageal cancer. She had previously been married to the actor Alec
Ross, from 1954 until his own death from oesophageal cancer in 1971.
Hancock and Thaw each brought a daughter to their marriage and had
another together. She loved both her husbands. “I was very lucky. One of
the best things that John and Alec gave me was somebody to love. It’s
every bit as important as being loved. It’s lovely loving, isn’t it? In
fact, I find it almost better, because being loved sometimes embarrasses
me, but loving is a gift.”
Today, though, there is no love interest. “Darling,” she says, “I did
go out on a date with a gentleman and halfway through the supper with
him I was thinking, 'Did I switch on my electric blanket?’ John and I
always used to walk hand in hand – usually because we were clinging on
to one another with fear if it was a Bafta award ceremony or something,
John’s sweaty palm in mine – and I occasionally see an old couple
walking hand in hand and I do have a horrible pang then and think, 'Oh
s---, I wish that was me’. But I soon get over it.” In her
novel, there is a brief mention of love-making between an elderly
couple. “If it came along, I might think about it, but I can’t waste
time thinking, 'Am I attractive enough to have sex?’ I really can’t,
because sex for me is an expression of love. It takes a long time to get
to that sort of love. And part of it, to begin with, is guile. What I
can’t do any more is pretend to be fascinating and sexy and attractive. I
can’t be bothered.” There was a period, after Thaw’s death,
when Hancock says she expected too much of her daughters. She wanted
them to call every day to check up on her, but realised suddenly that
she was being unreasonable. Although the grief hasn’t entirely left her,
she chose to cherish the life she has. “It seems to be a
betrayal of John not to live my life to the full. And also, you’ve got a
wonderful freedom when you get old, you have no responsibility. There’s
this phrase, 'Spending the kids’ inheritance’. I’m not responsible for
my daughters any more.” But she doesn’t feel lonely. “That’s the
joy of writing. What I couldn’t stop being is creative in some way. The
people I find who are not enjoying old age are the ones who cease to be
curious. It’s never too late to learn things.” Old age – and
“old” seems an out-of-place word when describing Hancock – has not got
to grips with her. “The reaction I get so much is, 'You’re not 81!’ I
swear to God I don’t feel any different. I’ve always felt slightly ill. I
was always aching and I was always injuring myself on stage. Then I had
cancer [breast cancer in the late Eighties]. So if I wake up and the
fingers are a bit achy, I think, 'Well, I’ve always felt like that.’ ”
When she describes the benefits of growing older, her sense of
naughtiness comes out. “I hate parties, I can never hear what anybody’s
saying. Now, if I want to leave, I just say, 'Look, I’m terribly sorry,
I’m getting a bit old for this.’ I’m not – I go on somewhere else. It’s a
wonderful excuse.” Although she no longer needs the money –
“I’m fine, thank goodness” – Hancock might return to the stage. “I may
do a play for a short run, but with my 10-year time lapse that I’ve set
myself, I can’t afford a year doing the same thing every night. If I do a
play, it will probably be new writing or something that I find
exciting.” At the moment, she has other things on her mind. “I’m
really getting ready for death so I don’t leave my children with
terrible complications. I’m throwing things out, having a real big
declutter. I’m even going round old people’s homes.” The urge, she says,
stems partly from her religion. “You do have a responsibility, as a
Quaker, to prepare for your death and not be a burden to people.”
Hancock also burnt the diaries upon which she based her book about her
life with Thaw. She’s not keeping a dirty secret, but avoiding hurting
those she loves. “I wrote at the end of the day, so if I’d had a row
with one of my kids, I’d write, 'Oh, she’s impossible, I don’t like her!
How did I have a daughter like this?’ The next day, or a week later, I
would look at that and think, 'What the hell was I talking about? Mad!
It’s absolutely not true.’ ” Remarkably, for a woman who has
achieved so much, Hancock would prefer to have been a teacher. “That is
the life I would like to have led, the woman I would like to have been.
I’ve faffed around being an actress, I’ve gone on the odd march, I’ve
involved myself with some campaigns, but I haven’t really done it – not
like teachers do, not like social workers. I worship people like that.
I’ve had a great life and hope I will continue to, but honestly, if I’d
known what university was like I would have gone. It’s been a big
disadvantage, it’s given me a terrible inferiority complex.
“When I was at the RSC later in my career, I think I was the only actor
who hadn’t been to university. I would have become a writer earlier,
too, because I didn’t have the courage to write. I’ve spent my life
being seen and not heard. Surprisingly, because I sound as though I’m
shouting my mouth off all the time. But I have been so inhibited all my
life. And that’s the other freedom of old age. You suddenly begin to
think, 'OK. Got nothing to lose.’ ”